Tavon White gave Jennifer Owens a diamond ring. He let her drive his black Mercedes Benz. Later he let her drive his white one. To show her allegiance to him, Jennifer got Tavon's name tattooed on her neck. Two times she got pregnant.

The story of Tavon and Jennifer would be your typical modern-day love story except for this: Tavon was confined to Baltimore City Detention Center, and Jennifer was one of his guards. Federal officials say Owens was one of three guards the inmate got pregnant, one of two guards who permanently inked his name into her skin, one of 13 guards (all of them women) federal prosecutors say helped the inmate and his gang move drugs, cell phones and money into and throughout the jail.

According to an indictment unsealed this week in the U.S. District Court in Baltimore, Tavon White is the leader of the Black Guerilla Family. Among the evidence the feds claim is a phone recording of White who boasts that a prisoner at Baltimore's jail can't even hit another prisoner in the mouth without first clearing the punch with him: "This is my jail. I'm dead serious... I make every final call in this jail, ... and nothing go past me, everything come to me ..."

I doubt there's any New Orleanian more eager to read about Baltimore than Orleans Parish Sheriff Marlin Gusman, the beleaguered leader of the Orleans Parish Prison. A few weeks ago, after we saw video of an escaped OPP inmate ambling along Bourbon Street and video of confined inmates injecting heroin, snorting cocaine and spreading their cash into fans, a front-page headline in this newspaper asked if Gusman is the country's worst jailer or if he's in charge of the country's worst jail. Of course, both could be true, but Gusman insists that neither is, that he's a competent manager running a jail that has problems that all jails share.

As he told The New Orleans Tribune, "Now look, it's prison. Jail. Some bad things are going to happen. You cannot sensationalize things like contraband. Contraband is present in every jail facility in this country. Every one. And escapes happen in every facility in this country."

Anybody who's seen those ads from personal-injury attorney Michael Hingle knows "stuff happens." It would be encouraging, though, if the sheriff expressed a little more confidence in his ability to reduce the frequency of those bad things. However, such quotes add to the impression that Gusman doesn't appreciate the magnitude of the scandal he's dealing with and that he'd rather divert our attention to all jails than focus on his own.

"What I make of all this, someone's asleep at the wheel there," Cannizzaro said. "This is something that should not happen in the parish prison." Who was asleep? Cannizzaro said, "A deputy. Somebody who's supposed to be watching, the people who are in charge, the sheriff. That is something that should not happen."

The Maryland indictments might bolster Gusman's claim that jails are tough to run. At the same time, the Baltimore story includes something our jail story does not: a leader taking the blame.

"It's totally on me. I don't make any excuses," said Gary D. Maynard, Maryland's secretary of Public Safety & Correctional Services. "We will move up the chain of command, and people will be held accountable," Maynard told The Washington Post.

In the Tribune interview Gusman said, "The only way I could explain how someone would question my leadership, my ability, has to be because they have a different agenda."

According to The Washington Post, the 13 indicted guards in Baltimore have all been suspended without pay, and a prison system spokesman said they'll all be recommended for termination. Gusman effectively exonerated his deputies. Nor did he press charges against any of the inmates shown in the videos.

Cannizzaro wishes he'd been told about the videos four years ago. He said it's too late now to bring charges for contraband, but there's still time to prosecute some of the drug and weapons violations depicted.

It seems that both our jail and Baltimore's were easy places for inmates to get high. But reportedly Baltimore's jail, at least for Tavon White, also served as a harem. Let's make a nod to Sheriff Gusman and say Baltimore's jail is worse. But let's be just as clear that what we've seen here is intolerable.